The prosody of list constructions

The paper addresses one of the current hot topics within Construction Grammar, namely the integration of phonetic and phonological features into constructions. More specifically, we investigate some suprasegmental features of list constructions in spontaneous Italian speech, in order to (i) unveil their role and relevance in the identification and interpretation of lists, and (ii) assess which traits might be incorporated into their representation. To this end, we analyze a sample of 92 naturally occurring lists (produced by 53 different speakers), taken from corpora of spoken Italian. We consider only nominal lists, with minimum three conjuncts and no general extenders. Our results show that lists have a recognizable prosodic profile and that some of their morphosyntactic and functional properties match some of the acoustic-prosodic and intonational features considered in our study. First, lists turned out to be characterized by a lower speech/articulation rate with respect to non-listing speech. Second, non-compositional lists, which require a greater processing effort, are slower than more compositional lists. Third, all lists, irrespective of their interpretation, are typically associated with tonal parallelism. These features were therefore incorporated into the list constructional network.